Teacher Who Attacked IDF in Class Gets Fired

Adam Verete says he is not sure if the sacking is connected to the firestorm he aroused earlier this year.

By Gil Ronen

First Publish: 5/25/2014, 3:54 PM

Adam Verete feted in Tel Aviv

Flash 90

Adam Verete, the teacher who caused a public storm when he told students before enlistment that the IDF was an immoral army, has been informed that he will not continue to teach next year at the ORT Kiryat Tivon high school, according to IDF Radio.

Verete told the military radio station that he was recently summoned to a hearing and told by the school's management that the Jewish Thinking track in which he teaches will be shut down in the next school year. He said that he does not know if there is a connection between the decision to fire him and the storm early this year, surrounding his political statements to students.

The ORT educational network said that it had to scale down some of its teachers' jobs and terminate others, due to changes in the the school's budget for teaching hours.

After a student, Sapir Sabah, complained in January that Verete was forcing his radical views on his students, ORT summoned him to a hearing, following which it reported that he “apologized this morning to his students and took back some of the things he said, primarily regarding the morality of the IDF and the position of ORT on enlistment, and clarified his other statements." It was decided to give him a warning not to repeat the incident, and not to take any further steps.

Sabah had written a letter on the matter to Education Minister Shai Piron, in which she said that he had caused her confusion. “I am supposed to join the army in less than a year, and my teacher is telling me that the army is immoral, and that anyone who joins it is forced to do cruel things,” the letter said.

In addition to railing against the army, the teacher, according to the student, told students that he was a radical leftist, “and according to him the state did not belong to the Jews at all but to the Arabs, and as far as he was concerned, the Jews had no business being in Israel at all.”

The teacher, said the student, told his students that he had voted for Hadash, the Israel Communist Party. “According to Education Ministry rules, politics are to be kept outside the classroom,” the student said. “This whole incident is very saddening.”